Lots of social networking feeds are used in ways we don’t understand. We’re talking about people who use Twitter and Facebook posts and MySpace bulletins to tell the world about their latest bowel movement or what they just ate or their current mood or what they just did with their right index finger. Sometimes it’s funny, and we know lots of bands think it’s good marketing — a way to keep their names in the forefront of people’s heads. But most of this minute-by-minute minutiae is just dull as dishwater, or worse.
But because we’re still feeling slightly guilty about using up today’s NCS space with an extended rant about Dave Mustaine, we thought we ought to do something else before calling it quits for the day. So we’re indulging in that same Twitter-esque impulse to just tell the world what we’ve been doing this morning. Don’t worry — we’ll keep the details of our latest bowel movements to ourselves. This will have something to do with music, though in a completely random way.
It’s just a log of what we’ve listened to and/or watched in our day so far. We’re not even recommending it. It’s just what we did, and like all those tweeters out there, we just presume you’ll be vividly interested.
First up is something that’s NSFW, but since it’s a holiday for most people in the U.S. and since most of our readers are probably out of work anyway, we’ll forge ahead. Plus, it will give us a chance to one-up some of the video nastiness that our guest contributor Steff Metal served up in her post about Metal from NZ a week ago.
This lead-off video, which is brand new, is from an Austrian band called Mastic Scum. It’s for a song called “Construcdead” from the band’s 2009 album, Dust. The song is a bruising piece of street-gutter death metal that’s pretty good. The conceptual theme of the video is someone’s idea of over-the-edge debauchery, framed in a metaphor of vehicular wreckage.
So, if it’s been a while since you snorted coke, shot-up with heroin, cavorted with oiled-up dominatrixes, stuffed your face with food, been bull-whipped, had a golden shower, took it up the bunghole with a black dildo, or dribbled snot uncontrollably — well, you can relive those fond memories by watching this: (after the jump, of course — and more of our morning log follows it . . . .)
MASTIC SCUM
Wasn’t that refreshing? BTW, Mastic Scum says in a recent blog post that it’s been nominated for an “Austrian Music Award 2010” in the category of “hard and heavy,” along with Belphegor and 3 other bands. Golden showers and enlarged bungholes to all the nominees!
ABANDON ALL SHIPS
So, after starting the morning with that, we moved on to this: Crabcore + electro-dance = Abandon All Ships. This is the title track from the Toronto band’s forthcoming album, due for release in October. I didn’t hate this nearly as much as I thought I would. I actually watched the thing all the way to the end.
Abandon All Ships “Take One Last Breathe” from Rise TSM on Vimeo.
After that, we needed a palate-cleanser. Would we find one?
UNKEMPT
Well, the next thing we did was check out a band from Lakeland, Florida who had hit us up on our MySpace site. They’re called Unkempt (cool name) and they’ve got an unmastered rough track up on their MySpace called “Pigs Get Fat, Hogs Get Slaughtered”. It’s a metalcore thumper with decent vocals (the shrieking + guttural + clean mix), wheeling guitars, and what sounds like a saxophone (?!?) as the lead-in to a breakdown.
You’ll have to jump to their MySpace page to hear “Pigs Get Fat”, but here’s a song from Unkempt’s last album (2008’s Scaling the Precipice, which is available on iTunes and at CDBaby), which we checked out after hearing “Pigs”.
DETHRONE THE SOVEREIGN
After listening to those two songs by Unkempt, we decided to check out a demo CD we received from a Salt Lake City band called Dethrone the Sovereign. We only listened to the first track, called “Carnival of Horrors”, before deciding to round up all this listening we’d done and “tweet” it to you through this post. But it’s the best find of the day so far.
The sound on “Carnival of Horrors” is keyboard-enhanced death metal with plenty of punch and groove and an unexpected segment of what does indeed sound like the kind of horror-show carnival music you might hear in Hell. Pretty damned cool, and certainly enough of an attention grabber that we’re going back to finish off that demo as soon as we put up this post. See for yourself:
So, there you have it. What we did with our morning so far. Were you riveted by our twitterish log? Should we do this kind of thing again? Or was it just another bad idea we ought to toss in the shitpile? Comments please.
14 Responses to “MISCELLANY”
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Regarding Mastic Scum, I like the song, but the video… um, not so much. Given your pre-jump text, I thought I was gonna have to shove some S.O.S. pads up my nose or scrub my eyes after seeing that video. It wasn’t that bad, but it’s not a video I care to ever see again, and I’m sure that guy sin’t going to be doing any of that again (or let it be done, as the case may be). Well, maybe not for a while.
But while I’m here, two things come to mind.
1. Why the mispelled song names? Mastic Scum has “Construcdead”, while Abandon All Ships has “Take One Last Breathe”, along with synchronized… I dunno, I guess you’d call it guitar lunging. I didn’t get to any any obvious crabcore moments, unless the aforementioned counts.
2. Why do so many vocalists doing metal like this have gauged earlobes? Granted, Mastic Scum’s vocalist doesn’t have ridiculously large ones, but I’ve seen some disturbing cranial goatse type stuff on some vocalists in videos I’ve seen. Just something I’ve been curious about. What have I been missing out on all these years?
Moving on to Dethrone The Sovereign… the song’s not band. Even if you hadn’t mentioned that it’s a demo, I might have been able to make that guess. And I assume you’re talking about that section from 1:35 to 2:10. They need to work on that part, I’d I’d drop the last five seconds of that bit and try something else, or just go back to what they were doing.
At the risk of sounding puritanical, the Mastic Scum video made me queasy, but the logic behind this post was literally to put up everything I saw and heard this morning. I ain’t watching it again either. The crabcore reference was indeed to the synchronized guitar-lunging — and in their case I’m really not sure the misuse of the “Breathe” spelling was intentional. Can’t help you on the gauge fetish. I don’t get it either. Makes my ink seem pretty tame.
Quickly before I head off to the cinema. I dig Mastic Scum, but the video was terrible. I wasn’t bothered by the subject matter, but the flashing from the dominatrix scenes to the junkyard was a bit much. There was no flow for the video.
And Islander, man I love your taste in music, put PLEASE don’t ever put anything up like Abandon All Ships. I thought I got teleported to exstacy induced rave. It made me want to do what you did when you read Dave’s interview……
And, by all means, continue the twitteresque posts. They are quite interesting.
Oh man, your comment made me laugh. But if we do this twitterish thing again, I can’t promise we won’t blindly stumble into something like Abandon All Shits — excuse me, Ships — again, and if we do, then it’ll have to go up on the site.
I’d say keep these going. Weekly, monthly, whatever. Sure, some crap may get through, but I’m guessing more decent stuff will float to the top instead.
I think we’ll do it again. WIth luck, you’ll be right and we’ll stumble upon some good music that we might not have found otherwise. And if we come upon dreck, it won’t take long for people to click away.
I definitely want you to keep it going, even if I have to wade through the shit that makes me go into incontollable convulsions. It would be worth it to read what funny and interesting shit you can come up with.
Thank you! Consider it a done deal.
LOL – I remember when Abandon All Ships played in my town (I only live 45 minutes from their hometown Toronto)
I was the only kid wearing a real band tee (Cannibal corpse). I was the only kid walking out of the venue too – They fuckin’ suck. the ‘vokillzist’ looks like a fuckin’ WOP in the that video. Fuck him.
Come on Aaron — don’t hold back on your opinions. Tell us how you really feel! 🙂
Actually, I’m stunned that anyone who visits this site has actually heard them live — even if only briefly. I can imagine the looks you got with a Cannibal Corpse shirt on!
Well, I was a glutton for punishment, so I made myself watch the entire Abandon All Ships Video.
Synchronized Guitar Lunges? Check. We already established this.
Slow motion footage? Check.
Reverse footage? Check.
Hit the ground with microphone? Check.
Flashes of light? Check?
Hmmm… as far as the video goes, I think I might almost want to watch that Mastic Scum video again.
But wait, sadism isn’t my thing. I’ll pass, thankyouverymuchsir!
Now, the song itself… where to begin.
They aren’t that bad, I suppose. It could be tolerable. Not really my thing, though, and there are two distinct elements, aside from the usual obligatory breakdown, that bring this to a screeching halt. Then ream it violently, not unlike what happened to the guy in the video for “Construcdead”.
The electro-dance stuff. Seriously, that kills it. It can be done, but these guys don’t have the proper balance. There’s too much of it, and it conflicts with the drumming and the riffs. Subtlety guys, you need it. What we have here sounds more like metal being superimposed over some Europop dance tune. Bleh.
But then…
Wait for it…
Auto-Tune.
AUTO-TUNE.
AUTOOOOOOOOO-TUUUUUUUUUUNE!!1!!one!
Now, this is only the second time I’ve heard Auto-Tune used in a metal song, the first in Orden Ogan’s “We Are Pirates” from the awesome Easton Hope album earlier this year (it’s power metal from Germany, in case you’ve never heard of them). But that’s meant as a fun song, an homage to pirate metal (without being an entire album’s worth) and folk metal, the latter of which Orden Ogan has roots in. And it’s a subtle touch.
Abandon All Ships’ use of it is over the top. I could live with contrasting harsh vocals and melodic clean singing. It might be a step towards nu-metal (which isn’t always a bad thing) vocally, but this is too much.
So, now I’ve heard two metal songs with Auto-Tune. One of them is good.
Guess what one that is.
Argh, see what this video made me do? Missing closing tags.
I think you’ve so thoroughly dissected the song and the video that there’s not enough left to bury. I have to confess that the electro-dance stuff is what made me watch/listen all the way to the end. I was just so dumb-struck by its appearance, and I thought it was kind of interesting at first. But then I decided the mash-up didn’t work. Now if you want to hear a different combo of metal and electro-dance, go back and check out Semargl. I probably shouldn’t say this, but it remains a real guilty pleasure of mine.
https://www.nocleansinging.com/2010/05/25/semargl-the-pop-fringe-of-black-metal/
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be the same again, after the videos here and the Goldfrapp video posted after Semargl.
Maybe I need to start haunting 4chan or something to take my mind off of the awful I’ve seen the past couple days, since the good stuff doesn’t seem to help.
But, I’m not that desperate for distractions yet.